The World Had the Document. It Chose Not to Read It.

This post continues the argument from “We Need This Blood: Some Thoughts on The Meaning of Blood in Hamas’s Psychotic Mind,” published on Substack May 2, 2026. AI translations in Hebrew, Portuguese, and French can be found in subsequent posts.

Haniyeh told us they need the blood. The Covenant told us why — in 1988, in plain language, on a website at Yale Law School where it has sat for decades. The question was never what Hamas believes. The question is why so much of the world refused to believe them, and what that refusal cost.

I. SPEAKING FROM INSIDE

Saddam Hussein wrote a Quran in his own blood. The Hamas Charter of 1988 was written in blood too — less literally, and far more consequentially.

My doctorate is in Islamic literature. I then trained as a psychoanalyst with a specialty in trauma and PTSD. In 1989, I sued the University of Minnesota under a sex discrimination decree — the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, though what it was really about was antisemitism. Two decades later I became a military contractor, slated to deploy to Helmand Province, Afghanistan in 2008 with the Human Terrain Program. I did not deploy. Due to antisemitism within the program, I was denied that opportunity — despite having graduated and received JPAS security clearance from the United States government.

These are not footnotes. They are the argument. I have spent my entire professional life not only believing what Hamas says but being penalized, institutionally, for insisting that others believe it too. I know the texture of that refusal. I know how it dresses itself up as sophistication, as complexity, as nuance. It is none of those things.

What I continue to do is study the mind and body language of the jihadis: their earliest developmental failures, the preverbal wounds that precede ideology, the way those wounds are coextensive with, mutually enhancing of, and ultimately inseparable from the tactical and strategic architecture of their terror. The inner world and the operational world are not separate domains in jihadi violence. They are the same domain. The psychosis I described in the previous post was not merely psychological. It was written down. Codified. Published. And the world’s refusal to read it is one of the defining moral failures of our time.

The Hamas Covenant, published August 18, 1988, is available in English on the Yale Law School’s Avalon Project website. Its preamble does not speak of occupation, borders or a Palestinian state:

“Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious… until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised.”........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)